The Know-It-All
The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9780743250627) 2005.
Summary: A memoir of reading the 32 volume 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover.
Many of us readers may not openly admit it, but secretly, we harbor the “know-it-all” dreams of A.J. Jacobs. We read voraciously, hoping to edge closer to knowing as much as we can about everything. Of course, this is a case of our reach exceeding our grasp. And most of us eventually settle for just being life long learners.
Perhaps Jacobs may be excused. He comes from a family of know-it-alls. His father held the record for the most footnotes in a law review article (5,435) and had also attempted to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. He got through the Bs. He also had a true know-it-all brother-in-law. Eric, who bested him in every conversation. Jacobs was pursuing a career in journalism, writing for Entertainment Weekly, and eventually Esquire. This afforded him a lot of knowledge of popular culture, but he felt all the learning of college slipping away. And so he landed on the project of reading through the 32 volumes of the 2002 Encyclopedia Britannica, from A-ak to Zywiec (a village in Poland).
Needless to say, his wife Julie, and most of the others thought it a bit crazy. And it got annoying when he injected strange facts and usually useless information into their lives, or worse, into their social gatherings. But what’s the value of being a know-it-all if you can’t show it?
The book is organized into an A to Z summary of his reading. We learn lots of interesting tidbits. For example, before vinaigrette was a salad dressing, it served as a deodorant in the eighteenth century. And A-ak? It’s a term referring to ancient East Asian music, explained more fully if you “see gagaku.” One might say, Jacobs read the Encyclopedia so we don’t have to, summarizing 33,000 pages in 400.
But there is so much more. Fancying himself a genius, he tries to join Mensa. It turns out he qualified based on his college entrance exam and a good thing, too. He miserably failed the Mensa test. But in the Mensa gatherings he generally found himself out of their league. Then there are the attempts to get onto game shows. Turns out an earlier interview with Alex Trebek disqualified him from competing. However, he manages to get onto Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Turns out he stumbles on something he read about back in the Es: erythrocytes. What component of blood are they. It turns out his brilliant brother-in-law Eric is also clueless and he ends up guessing wrong. The answer: red blood cells. So all that reading adds up to $1000 and an interesting story.
He discovers that reading the encyclopedia is a losing battle with memory. Conversations with an expert on intelligence suggest that the learning in encyclopedias is only one kind of intelligence, and perhaps not the most useful in every day life. But he is inspired by a visit to the Encyclopedia Britannica offices, where he even contributes some corrections! So what does he learn? In addition to a lot of great Scrabble words, he glimpses both the awful messes and the huge achievements of humankind. The achievements give him hope. And perhaps the article on Ecclesiastes gives him the greatest wisdom–that while life is absurd, to take pleasure in the good things God provides. And he closes the last volume, realizes he has his life back (after often reading four hours a day in addition to his day job) and enjoys a lovely dinner with his wife.
The book convinced me to settle for more modest projects. I wasn’t always sure I liked Jacobs very much, even though his romp through the encyclopedia was fun. But he is who he is with us and I guess that counts for something. So, if you’ve ever had aspirations to read through an encyclopedia (harder because only World Book still prints them), you might want to read this first. It could save you a lot of time.